Demokratik Toplum Partisi Under Attack from Turkish State

Shiraz socialist blogs:

Interesting summary in today’s Zaman of goings on at the congress of the Demokratik Toplum Partisi, the left-Kurdish nationalist coalition in the Turkish parliament which is threatened by closure along with the ruling AK Partisi. It would seem that the party’s “moderates”, led by Ahmet Türk, have the leadership but have gotten it on the basis of an accommodation with more radical factions. It is pleasing to see such unity in the face of potentially devastating attack from the state.

Albeit deeply flawed, the DTP is the nearest thing in national level Turkish politics to a significant left-wing force. It is therefore an entity whose persecution should be of some concern to all progressive and left-wing people in the West who care about Turkey and its future. One would certainly hope that, even where people (wrongly in my view) might support the use of the Constitutional Court against the Islamist-descended AKP, they would at least stand in defence of a party explicitly set up to stand for progressive politics and Kurdish rights.

Killing Has Become the Norm

Aruni Kashyap blogs on the recent repression by the Indian government on the people of India:

Manoj Deka’s brutal murder by Asam police in the name of counter insurgency operation holds multiple shocking implications about current politics in Assam. Manoj Deka was a senior leader of the Communist Party of India, Assam and held the post of the Morigaon district CPI General Secretary.

[Hat Tip: Bhupinder]

Freedom and Labor in Latina/o USA

Profe, of LatinoLikeMe.com, blogs on democracy, freedom, and labor:

It is through this process of analysis that I make sense of the daily experiences of immigrant labor in this nation. When I say this, I do not only mean undocumented labor. The Southern Poverty Law Center provides a beautifully-detailed report on legal guestworker programs in place in the United States. “Close to Slavery” is a reminder of the brutal ways a government’s protection of the “rights” of an elite group of business interests–in the name of free market capitalism–sacrifices the humanity of hundreds of thousands of others.

FISA, Tortoises, Obama

JanInSanFran blogs on the recent FISA law passed by the House:

Trusting souls we if we look to Democrats to safeguard liberties. They won’t. At root, they don’t believe that any significant number of their base cares enough to make them uncomfortable when they go along to get along. They trust their white skins and their money ensure their privilege. This seems rather stupid, but one of the features of privilege long-enjoyed is stupidity. An animal without predators ceases to be wary like those poor Galapagos tortoises that stick their necks out to meet humans.

Students Stranded in Gaza

Haitham blogs about the aftermath of seven students getting their Fulbright scholarships revoked, then reinstated, yet still being stranded in the Gaza Strip:

For the mainstream press, this story “moved quickly” and has now concluded with a positive ending for the Gaza Fulbright seven. But hundreds of other Palestinian students remain stranded inside the Gaza Strip, and the number is expected to rise this summer. According to data from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), almost 700 Palestinian students are still waiting to leave Gaza in order to pursue studies, and scholarships, abroad. “This number will increase within the next month, after the schools announce their exam results and Gaza students want to move onto universities” says Khalil Shaheen, a senior PCHR researcher. “All of these students are stranded inside the Gaza Strip because of the Israeli siege and closure, and they are being denied their rights to pursue their education, and their futures.”

Candian Parliament Votes for Asylum

Sean Purdy blogs:

Yesterday, the Canadian parliament voted 137-110 to give asylum to U.S. war resisters (known in the mainstream media as “military deserters”) and allow them permanent resident status. Officially, there are an estimated 200 U.S. soldiers who have fled to Canada in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan but there are probably many more resisters who have not come forward yet.

The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is free to ignore the decision since it was an unbinding motion. He has said as much. However, it is an extremely important victory in the campaign by the anti-war movement in Canada and the U.S. and will certainly put substantial pressure on Harper…

The War Inside

Terrance blogs about Memorial Day, his father, and the wars being fought now:

One of the earliest rules I remember learning as a child was how to wake dad up from a nap. Don’t touch him or shake him, I was told. He might be dreaming about being back in Vietnam, or the defensive reflex required to survive there might kick in and the reaction might be violent. So, when it was time to wake him up, we would stand at the door and call to him until he responded, even well into my high school years. Looking back, in think it was a way of not releasing the war inside — the war he carried with him — into our home.

…

It’s bad enough that we sent men and women overseas to fight a war founded disinformation, in insufficient numbers, and with inadequate equipment. But, when they come home with deep psychological wounds from that war, and we give them less than the treatment they need, Memorial Day celebrations and speeches ring hollow.

Student Activists and Protests

Michael Connery blogs about the protests over Tony Blair’s speech at Yale:

Normally I’m skeptical of student anti-war protests. While throwing a pie in Tom Friedman’s face might be emotionally satisfying on some level, it accomplishes very little in the way of real change. In recent years, students have achieved far greater success on campus when their protests were directed at their college or university. Over the past half decade, student protests have helped establish a living wage for workers at Harvard, many campuses, bowing to student pressure have divested from regimes involved in human rights abuses, and many more campuses have made strides toward becoming carbon neutral thanks to the pressure of students. The same cannot be said of student anti-war efforts.

That may be changing…

Letter From the Mahalla Detainees

Hossam blogs on the latest of the Mahalla detainees in Egypt. Over the past two years strikes have been cripling the Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak; these strikes have been lead by the workers in Mahalla, Egypt, the industrial center for Egypt. Of those strikers and protesters three prominent leaders have been arrested due to their actions during the April 6th strikes. They recently released a letter:

A week has passed on our hunger strike and we are extremely weak. We are appealing to you as the last and only resort for all who have suffered injustice in Egypt.

We would like in the beginning to correct certain information which has reached the press about our (the three of us) having been transferred to the prison hospital as a result of our hunger strike.

The truth is that we are still in prison after the administration refused to call an ambulance to take us to hospital, and as a result of the inability of Karim el-Beheiry and Tareq Amin to stand on their feet - as a result of their extreme weakness. Instead, a “nurse” was summoned to examine Karim, whose condition has seriously deteriorated.

We would like to know the reason why we remain in detention. We will continue the hunger strike until we either die or receive this information.

…

Signed
Kamal El-Fayyoumy, Tareq Amin, Karim El-Beheiry
Detained workers from Mahalla
Borg el-Arab Prison
Wing 22, Cell 5

Revolution and White Privilege

Neela blogs:

I’ve recently watched a couple of documentaries about radical movements in the 1960s and 70s:Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, The Weather Underground and a narrative film about the Naxalite movement in West Bengal called Calcutta My Love. 

Both of the first two films were fascinating but left me feeling irritated at the ludicrousness of it all - especially at the white privilege that protected many of these so-called revolutionaries, whereas members of the Black Panther Party faced a decidedly different fate.

“Globalize” resistance and protest

Carol P. Araullo, the chairperson of BAYAN, a large umbrella front of progressive and left-wing organizations in the Philippines, blogs on the food crisis and the culpability of President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines:

But this time around, we can readily agree that the rice/food crisis is happening worldwide and its immediate causes and historical roots cannot be strictly confined to the specific policies and concrete situations obtaining in particular countries. Indeed, the international agribusiness cartels such as the small clique of corporations that control the world’s fertilizer and pesticide market, the largest seed companies (e.g. Monsanto), the largest grain traders (e.g. Cargill) and the world’s big food processors (e.g. Nestle), their local business partners in third world countries and the homegrown trading cartels (e.g. in rice) have made a killing in the midst of growing hunger, food riots and panic buying by governments and households.

Having said that, we reiterate that the Arroyo regime is not blameless, in fact it must own up to and be held accountable for the neoliberal policies and programs it has perpetuated and even accelerated in implementation that today aggravates the rice crisis.

“What could go wrong did go wrong.”

The blogger at Lenin’s Tomb posts his thoughts on the latest assembly elections in London:

Anyone who thinks that Labour is about to turn left is kidding themselves. Far more likely is that the government will take a more aggressive stance toward the unions (as it did in 1969, with ‘In Place of Strife’) and make a demonstrative crackdown on immigration (as it did with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968). Labour doesn’t contain the resources for a regeneration of its battered left, any more than it did when John McDonnell failed to get enough PLP support to even run a campaign against Gordon Brown. The last vaguely leftish credible alternative to Brown was the late Robin Cook, whose standing after his dignified antiwar resignation speech would have made him the obvious candidate. And even he would have struggled. Just because the left-of-Labour vote was poor, just because the Tories have made a decisive recovery, don’t think that we can place our hopes in a New Labour conversion, or that we can avoid continuing to try to build a left-of-Labour alternative. We will be lying to ourselves in quite a dangerous way if we imagine that we can claw back some space by just abandoning the electoral terrain to New Labour. The fact that it is now a more difficult task in the short-term does not mean it can be wished away.

Inner-City Schools Shut Down as Media Fiddles

Barbara at WIMN’s Voics blogs:

The story of thousands of schoolchildren without a library and books should be front-page news. Since when did sending inner-city children to bigger schools become a positive educational step in a city concerned with high dropout rates? The story of established neighborhood schools – with acceptable school rankings – closing their doors for lack of enrollment should be a reason for investigative stories by the media. The community should be outraged, right?

Not in San Antonio. Who’s going to tell this story? Here, one Hearst chain newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News is blitzing its ads on the front page as it seeks even more profits. Corporations, according to Jimenez Reyes, are the real power behind the closing of the six schools in a balance-the-budget bottom-line mentality as the developers seek prime inner-city real estate.

TOXIC SLUDGE IS GOOD (enough for black folk)…

Francis L. Holland blogs about a recent article he read from the Associated Press:

Although whites would have us believe that AIDS could NOT have been started by whites and that the Tuskegee Experiment could never happen again,

BALTIMORE - Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful ingredients.

…

It galls me. It galls me that the major news institutions can make federal cases out of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s prophetic indignation at a nation whose policies undervalue and marginalize whole populaces, and reduce it to the rantings of a mad man, when in our own backyard our own government is conducting more experimentation on its citizens!

[Hat Tip: the field negro]

Martin Luther King Jr.

Sokari blogs:

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I hear that Hilary Clinton and John McCain will be in Memphis to mark the day. I am sure Barack Obama will seize the time add his $2 worth. I hear that Democratic and Republican leaders met yesterday on Capitol Hill to mark the day. No doubt the warmongering racist, Mr George Bush will speak to [dis]honour Mr King. Hypocrites everywhere will come out to speak false words and use the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr for their own interest.

They are all liars.

In Search of Ramrajya

V Ramaswamy writes a four part series on Muslims and Hindus in India and his own experiences as a community and grassroots organizer. Below is an excerpt from part I. Ramaswamy wrote this post for Blogbharti’s Spotlight Series.

It was only in the aftermath of 6 December 1992 that I came alive to the question of Muslims in India. I was an atheist, and a left-oriented social activist working on issues of urban poverty, low-income housing, slums and squatters. Riots had hit Calcutta too, with Muslim bastis being torched in Tangra in east Calcutta and in Metiabruz in the west. This was the first time in my life that I knew communal riots in my city. The enforced stay at home when Calcutta was under curfew in the days following 6 December 1992, led to an enforced engagement with this question, the Muslim question, something I had hardly thought about earlier. Afterwards, my friend, photographer Achinto, and I went to Tangra. The people from the burnt out slum were sheltered in the municipal slaughterhouse. I will never forget that sight, a vision of hell.

Part II, Part III.

Obama and Progressivism

Margaret Kimberley, an editor for Black Agenda Report, writes:

The rush to tag along with Barack Obama’s presidential juggernaut shows beyond doubt that progressive “movement” politics is “on its death bed” in the United States, on both sides of the racial divide.

…

It doesn’t seem to matter that as a United States Senator his votes on Iraq are the same as Hillary Clinton’s. It doesn’t matter that he once opposed establishing a deadline for withdrawal. It doesn’t matter that he parrots the words of Republicans when he speaks of “the excesses of the 60s and 70s.” None of what he says matters, because speaking up would mean fighting back, and there is no movement left to do that.

Real Israelis

Connie writes on Sabbah Blog about a recent ad campaign in Israel:

An aggressive public relations campaign against military draft evaders is currently being waged on billboards, television sets and computer screens throughout Israel. Entitled “Real Israelis Don’t Shirk the Draft,” the low point of this campaign is a brief video clip featuring secular, European Jewish Israelis in their early twenties, sitting around drinking chai during their post-military trip abroad.

No Olympics on Stolen Land

Verbena-19 reposts an article on her blog:

“By them choosing to have the Olympics here, it’s opening up our land, our sacred sites, our medicine grounds,” says Kanahus Pellkey. “We want investors to know our land is not for sale.” Pre-Olympic fever occupies the province of BC, and the economic excitement has massively accelerated gentrification and the building of highways, resorts, and condos. The construction of infrastructure for the 2010 Olympics itself is adding to extensive destruction of traditional homelands of the local Indigenous peoples.

Economic Stimulus For Whom?

Yolanda asks:

Can someone please explain why this thing was called an “economic stimulus package?” Economic stimulus for whom, I ask you? And why all the emphasis on short-term boosts from the retail sector? How the hell does shopping for more useless crap lead to any kind of economic recovery (if that is indeed the intent)?

Will the Real General Ripper Please Stand Up

Renegade Eye posts on Histologion:

The Guardian reports that five prominent military officers have submitted a “manifesto for a new NATO” which advocates that

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the “imminent” spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction…

he manifesto as presented by the Guardian is like something out of an updated Dr. Strangelove movie. It purports to defend the West’s values, lamenting that “the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them”. The particular subset of the West’s values being defended hails from the colonial era, with a healthy dose of the “shoot first and see who’s dead later” ethos which has endeared billions of the unfortunate portion of humanity to the West and its values for some centuries now…

Fire in the Delta

Black Looks blogs on the situation in the Niger Delta and posts a video:

In 2005, the High Court declared gas flaring illegal yet both the Nigerian government and oil multinationals have ignored the court ruling. Last year the Nigerian government once again promised to stop all gas flaring on the 1st January this year - a promise that goes back nearly 40 years. Companies defying the order were to be shut down. Once again the government has shown complete disregard and insensitivity to the communities in the Niger Delta and given into pressure from Shell, Chevron, Elf etc. The date has now been set for the end of the year but no one really believes that the government will once again bow to the oil multinationals.

[Hat Tip:  Change Seeker]

Minners’ Safety

Cross-posted from The Ghost of Tom Joad.

I haven’t been blogging lately because I injured my back at work.  Not a serious injury, just a back sprain.  I’ll blog more on that latter.  In the mean time, some workplace safety issues I just read up on regarding miners.  UPS has a lot of safety issues itself and I should know since I’m the union representative on the local safety committee.  More on all of that latter though:

The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA’s) foot-dragging on developing new mine safety rules mandated by the 2006 MINER Act and other legislation has caught up with it. Now, the agency is begging for help.

Bhutto’s Incompetence

Ross, on Moveable Feast, writes:

Despite the prevailing opinion, Benazir’s death may offer new hope for democratic values: rights, the rule of law, and law enforcement.

Benazir Bhutto gave Pakistan false hope of these enlightened values two decades ago. In a shocking display of ineptitude, Pakistan’s first woman prime minister failed to pass a single piece of major legislation during her first 20 months in power. According to Amnesty International, Bhutto’s particular brand of democracy while in office - in the words of historian William Dalrymple, “elective feudalism” - brought some of the world’s highest numbers of extrajudicial killings, torture, and custodial deaths. Transparency International characterized hers as one of the world’s most corrupt governments.

Obama and Radical Values

Kameelah blogs about Obama and her struggles on being a Black woman but also seeing that Obama, for her, is not a candidate she can support:

I want–no NEED a candidate I can genuinely be excited about. I need to be passionate about this leader as I am about I want someone who can challenge the very values of this nation, and dare I say capitalism itself. I don’t think I will see that candidate before I pass from this Dunya. When I say he does not present something radically different from those who came before him, I am trying with all delicacy, but conviction to say that Obama like the other candidates does not challenge the fundamental values, relationships and tragedies reproduced by capitalism. And, I can’t expect that he does–no one would ever support him. It is not my intention to present a heterodox narrative/desire/dream for the sake of the pompus and self-aggrandizing exercise of being a contrarian; I sincerely believe in what I write here.